Sheldon Adelson lost his first fight with a union. Will it have a domino effect?

Security guards at the Sands Bethlehem Casino defeated the Trump supporter, one of the country’s most high-profile and powerful opponents of labor unions

The Sands Bethlehem Casino is in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, which twice voted for Barack Obama but flipped for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
Photograph: Mark Makela for the Guardian

When Sheldon Adelson’s casino empire opened a new branch in 2009 on the grounds of the old Bethlehem Steel mill in Pennsylvania, the interior designers played up the link to faded industrial glory.

The gaming floor drips with lights the color of liquified iron ore. There’s a Steelworks Buffet & Grill, and the late-night lounge is called Molten.

But there was another bit of Bethlehem Steel’s legacy that the casino company might not have counted on: labor unions.

The ratification of a new union contract by security guards at the Sands Bethlehem Casino on Wednesday night marked the first time that a workforce within Adelson’s global empire, the Las Vegas Sands Corp, had successfully unionized, despite years of efforts by the Culinary Workers’ union and others in Las Vegas.

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Security employees at Sands Bethlehem voted 70-6 in favor of a contract that gives 146 workers an 8% wage increase, and that sets up a seniority system and grievance process. The vote was the result of five years of work by organizers and a year of negotiating between the Sands Corp and the Security Police Fire Professionals of America.

The Bethlehem casino is in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, which twice voted for Barack Obama but flipped for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. The Guardian has this year begun a long-range reporting project called The Promise to find out what voters in the former steel county are hoping for, and asking: can Trump deliver?

George Bonser, a former security guard at the casino who had previously spent 30 years as a steelworker and union leader, helped organize the unionization effort. He said workers supported the union out of frustration over years of failed communication with the company about employee rights.

“We’ve been harping on this for a while, and that’s why it came to this,” Bonser told the Guardian.

Adelson, whose net worth is estimated at more than $30bn by Forbes, is one of the country’s most high-profile, and powerful, opponents of labor unions. He spent an estimated $105m on political races in 2012, with crippling unions as his top priority, he told the Wall Street Journal at the time.

This year, Adelson spent more than $20m to help elect Trump. Trump supports “right-to-work” laws that would ban requiring employees in unionized workplaces to pay union dues. The laws are an existential threat to unions, with individual employee opt-outs effectively annulling any majority vote to unionize.

Union leaders say that Adelson’s willingness and ability to wage scorched-earth legal and publicity campaigns against unions – not his generosity – are what have kept unions out of his properties. Photograph: Mark Makela for the Guardian

Since the election, Adelson has held multiple one-on-one meetings with Trump, and he and his wife, Miriam, attended the inauguration. “The president believes in right to work,” press secretary Sean Spicer said earlier this month.

The Las Vegas Sands Corp does not expect the Bethlehem unionization effort to have a domino effect elsewhere, spokesman Ron Reese told the Guardian.

“We don’t anticipate other organizing efforts because our pay benefits and working conditions have always exceeded those negotiated by unions,” Reese said. “In point of fact, despite the union bosses’ strong desire for it to be otherwise, the Venetian Las Vegas has been a non-union property since it opened in 1999.”

In an effort to stop union protests outside his flagship Venetian casino on the Las Vegas strip, Adelson battled the culinary workers’ union in court for a decade, all the way to the supreme court. The battle ended with a loss for Adelson in his effort to silence the protests – but there’s still no union inside the casino.

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Union leaders say that Adelson’s willingness and ability to wage scorched-earth legal and publicity campaigns against unions – not his generosity – are what have kept unions out of his properties.

Before taking a security guard job at the casino, Bonser had worked for 30 years in unionized steel fabrication shops and had most recently served as vice-president of Local 2599 steelworkers, an amalgam of local steel unions.

Bonser said he had not planned on doing any work involving unions at the casino, which grossed $534m in the past fiscal year. But he was leaving work one day with a colleague who had been a steelworker and union leader at the Bethlehem plant, the legendary production site of steel for epic American infrastructure projects from the Manhattan skyline to the Golden Gate Bridge.

The pair was approached by colleagues who had been having problems with a supervisor, Bonser said.

“I said, ‘You guys can’t walk out. You guys walk out, you’re done. You can fight whatever with the labor department, but they’re going to keep you out, you’re done. You’re not going to get your job back. They’ll do whatever they have to do, even if they have to work the other two shifts to death.”

The guards asked the former steelworkers what to do.

“I’m thinking,” Bonser said with a laugh. “I’m thinking, ‘You gotta get a union!’ I’ll never forget that.”